Long Way Home (30 page)

‘The going rate is two or three thousand for a job like that,’ Zigic said. ‘So, how much do you think all Phil’s chains and rings are worth?’

‘He wouldn’t do that.’

‘I think he would. There’s no other explanation.’

She snatched up the onyx ring, a wild look in her eyes. ‘He wouldn’t give him
this
. The rest of it maybe, but not
this.
He swore to me he’d never take it off as long as he lived.’

‘So why is it here now instead of on his finger?’

She slammed it down. ‘He was mugged.’

‘I don’t think so,’ Zigic said. ‘I think you’d had enough of Stepulov and Phil went to the only person he knew who could help. His old mate Clinton Renfrew.’

Gemma shook her head, tears springing into her eyes.

‘Now’s where you tell me the truth, Gemma. Before I talk to Renfrew.’

She sobbed into her hands.

‘Because once he realises we’re going to charge him he’ll drop the pair of you in it to save himself.’ Zigic slipped the rings away again, reminding her that they were evidence. ‘That’s what Renfrew does. He cuts deals to save his own skin.’

She wiped her eyes on the cuff of her cardigan.

‘He will throw you to the wolves,’ Zigic said. ‘Both of you, unless you tell me what happened.’

‘Ask Phil, he’ll –’ She stopped herself abruptly, lips pressed together so tightly that they almost disappeared.

‘What, Gemma?’ Zigic asked, trying to catch her eye. ‘What’s Phil going to tell me?’

A wobbly breath shuddered out of her but she didn’t reply.

‘Phil will tell me what really happened? Is that it?’

‘I want to leave.’ She stood up, gathering her handbag from under the chair.

‘Do you know what happened, Gemma?’

She started for the door and he moved quickly to block her escape. Their faces were inches apart but she wouldn’t look at him, fixed her eyes on the chrome door handle she didn’t dare reach for.

‘You’re not helping Phil, do you understand that? The longer this goes on and the more you two lie, the worse it’ll be when we charge you.’

She grabbed the handle but his fingers were already there.

‘I want to go home,’ she said, her voice breaking. ‘Phil’ll be worried where I am.’

‘If Renfrew did this, you need to tell me right now.’

Finally she lifted her chin and met his gaze, and when she spoke the exertion was audible in every word,

‘Arrest me or let me leave.’

Zigic waited for a couple of beats, seeing how fast she was breathing, hearing the squeak of her hand tightening around the strap of her shoulder bag. Then he opened the door and stepped aside.

‘We’ll speak again, Gemma, very soon.’

VISITING HOURS WERE
almost over when Ferreira and Adams arrived at Ward 7, a few patients sitting upright in their beds, talking in quiet voices or eating the food their families had brought in for them. Most were alone, their people come and gone, or maybe they had no one, Ferreira thought.

A man in chinos and a check shirt was wandering around near the nurses’ station, looking for someone to answer his questions, but there wasn’t a staff member anywhere to be seen, except for a small Indonesian auxiliary pushing a cleaning trolley.

Ferreira hated this place.

Hated all hospitals.

Last year her mother had a cancer scare and she’d come with her for the appointment, sat in a waiting room in another part of the building, surrounded by grim-faced women dressed up for the occasion with their daughters and friends in tow. A few had brought their boyfriends or husbands for support and they looked trapped and bored as they waited, already planning their escape routes in case the news was bad.

Her mother had been terrified. Not of the cancer, she was strong enough to face that down and fight it, but of how her father would react to a mastectomy. In the car on the way over she had cried, looking down at her bust, saying she wouldn’t blame him if he left her. What man would want her after that?

When she went in to see the specialist, a dour Germanic man with hair that looked like a toupee, Ferreira sat flicking through an old magazine, seeing nothing, rehearsing the talking-to she would give her father if the tests came back positive. She wanted to believe he was better than that. In the car she had found a smile for her mother and told her not to be ridiculous, he loved her, he would see her through it. But deep down she knew better.

They both knew what kind of man he was even if they’d never openly discussed it. They were that kind of family; too close for secrets, too Catholic for confrontation. He had affairs, Ferreira saw it in the way he behaved around women. She knew how to spot a man who would disregard his wedding ring when there was a sure fuck on offer, she’d been out with enough of them. Faced with a suddenly imperfect wife he would run to whichever whore he was seeing on the side.

It never came to that, though. The results were negative, just a benign fatty deposit, and everything went back to normal.

‘Watch out.’ Adams grabbed her elbow and pulled her aside as an obese man in an electric wheelchair cut along the corridor, scattering people left and right. ‘Fucking idiot.’

‘Do you want to chase him down and give him a ticket?’

‘We could give him an on-the-spot fine and split it,’ Adams smiled. ‘I won’t tell if you won’t.’

‘So that’s how you afford such expensive suits.’

‘They’re not expensive, it’s how I wear them.’

Ferreira nodded. ‘Natural style?’

‘You know it.’

They passed the last bay on the corridor, a large group around the bed nearest the window, where an emaciated Sikh man was being fed rice from a Tupperware container by a woman in a red sari. A heated discussion was going on around the foot of the bed, three young men, all with the same sharp profile, talking in a mix of English and Punjabi, the word negligence tossed between them.

Outside Paolo Perez’s room a different PC was on guard, this one not so alert as his predecessor. He sat hunched over, thumbs swiping across his phone’s touchscreen, eliciting cartoon sounds. He didn’t notice them approach until Adams kicked his booted foot.

‘That work, is it?’

‘Sorry, sir.’ He fumbled the phone as he stood and it dropped with a crack.

‘Pick it up.’

He stooped to retrieve it.

‘I see you fucking around like that again you’ll be operating it with your prostate.’

‘Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.’

They went into Paolo’s room.

The television was on, showing the BBC News Channel, and among the debris of chocolate wrappers and coffee cups on the table pulled across his bed was a copy of today’s
Evening Telegraph
; his shooting had made the front cover.

‘How’re you feeling?’ Ferreira asked.

‘A little better, thank you.’

‘That’s good. Has Marco been back?’

‘Yes. He brought me some things.’

‘I’m not sure you should be having coffee in your condition,’ Ferreira said, seeing how tired he looked, hearing the listlessness in his speech.

She placed the file she’d brought with her on the table and slipped off her jacket. The room was stifling but Paolo had the covers pulled up to his waist and he’d acquired a pyjama top from somewhere. He had his good arm in it, the rest draped around his shot shoulder, and it swamped his thin form.

‘You questioned me,’ he said to Ferreira. ‘This morning.’

‘That’s right.’

‘Are you Portuguese?’

‘Yes. From Lisbon. Where do you come from?’

‘Carvoeiro. Do you know it?’

‘No. I’ve been here since I was seven.’

‘It is very beautiful. You should come there on holiday.’

Ferreira smiled. ‘I might do that.’

Adams stood by the door, hands on his hips, a picture of stressed impatience. Or maybe he just didn’t like being shut out of the conversation, Ferreira thought.

‘Is he up to being questioned, Mel?’

‘I am, sir, yes.’

‘Great, we’ll do this in English then.’

‘Are you OK with that, Paolo?’ Ferreira asked.

‘I think so.’

‘Well, just switch when you need to. It’s no big deal.’

Adams opened the door again and clicked his fingers at the PC, came back a moment later with the man’s chair and placed it at the foot of the bed.

‘Do your thing first, Mel, get it out of the way.’

She opened the file and found the photograph of Viktor Stepulov, handed it to Paolo.

‘Do you recognise this man?’

He nodded quickly. ‘Yes, he was at the same place as me.’

‘Where you worked?’

‘Yes. I did not know him but I saw him. He was there for some time then he was not. I thought he got out somehow. Why do you ask about him? He would not have shot me.’

‘Three months ago someone took this man’s dead body and put it on a set of train tracks just outside Peterborough.’

Paolo’s hands curled into tight fists on his thighs, rucking the blanket. ‘So he did not get out. They killed him and tried to make it look like an accident.’

‘It appears so, yes.’

‘There have been more then,’ Paolo said. ‘I thought Xin Gao was the first but now there is him too and I think the other men who disappeared from the site must have died also.’

‘What other men?’ Adams asked.

‘Many. I don’t know names. One day they are there in the van, at work, another day they are gone and nobody knows where.’

‘Didn’t you ask your ganger?’

Paolo scowled at Adams, the bruising pinched under his eyes. ‘You do not ask questions there. If you ask once you are beaten. You do not make that mistake a second time.’

‘Is that what happened to you?’ Ferreira asked, softening her voice.

‘No. I tried to stop them. I could see that they were going to throw him into the footing and I knew I had to do something. One of them punched me and then they picked Xin Gao up and – he was still alive when they threw him into the concrete, I swear it, I heard him moan.’ Paolo looked up at the ceiling. The heart rate monitor pinged, faster and faster, and Ferreira saw a vein pulsing in the side of his neck. ‘They made me watch while they pushed him under. They told me I would go in there next.’

‘Where did this happen?’ Adams asked.

Paolo shook his head. ‘We were on a site somewhere – I do not know the place. They took us in vans. There were fields all around us.’

‘What was nearby?’

‘I do not know. We passed houses. These big –’ he switched to Portuguese, looking at Ferreira – ‘wind turbines. A lot of them.’

She told Adams.

‘They’re all over the place on the fens,’ he said. ‘We need to know where you were, Paolo. You want us to catch them, you need to give us something to go on.’

‘Where were you living?’ Ferreira asked him. ‘Were you in Peterborough?’

‘No. In the countryside.’

Adams shifted in his seat and Ferreira realised he was getting annoyed with Paolo. He thought they were being lied to, she’d seen that expression before, and she wondered why it wasn’t obvious to him how scared Paolo was.

‘Who shot you?’

‘I don’t know which one it was.’

‘Didn’t you see them?’

‘I was running,’ Paolo said. ‘It was dark. I just wanted to get away from them.’

Ferreira pressed his hand. ‘Paolo, we want to find these people and arrest them. And when we do they’ll be going straight to prison, they won’t be able to get at you. No matter what they’ve said, if they’ve threatened you or your family, I promise they won’t be able to touch you. OK? But you need to tell us who they are.’

‘I do not know,’ he said angrily. ‘They were English.’

Adams sighed. ‘Alright, that’s a start. Names?’

‘They did not use names in front of us.’

‘Never?’

‘No.’

‘In all the time you were there?’

‘They did not speak to us. They ordered us about, told us what to do. That was all.’

‘How did you get the job?’ Ferreira asked.

‘There was a man at the bus. He was waiting for some workers to arrive, I think. He started talking to me and asked how I was getting on here. I told him it was bad and I was going home. He told me he had a job if I wanted it. Easy work, but good money.’

‘And you didn’t think that sounded unlikely?’ Adams asked.

‘I am not an idiot,’ Paolo said. ‘I knew it would be hard work but I am not afraid of that.’

‘Was the money good?’

‘There was no money.’ Paolo smiled bitterly. ‘We were slaves. Do you understand? They paid us nothing. No money. Ever. If you asked about money you were beaten. If you complained they set a pack of dogs on you.’

‘Why didn’t you leave?’ Adams asked.

Paolo pointed at the gunshot wound on his shoulder. ‘This is what happened when I left. If that lady didn’t stop I would be dead now and nobody would know.’

Adams sat up straighter in his chair. ‘This lady –’

‘I must thank her,’ Paolo said. ‘Can I speak to her?’

‘We wouldn’t mind speaking to her ourselves,’ Adams said under his breath. ‘She dumped you at A&E and did a runner. Nobody’s seen her since.’

‘Then you must find her. She might be in danger.’

‘I’m sure she’s fine,’ Ferreira said.

But it did nothing to calm Paolo. His feet scissored under the covers and the fearful look, which never departed for more than a few seconds, came back into his eyes.

‘What if they followed her?’

‘Do you know what car she was driving?’ Adams asked.

‘A small one. Red. I did not notice the make,’ Paolo said. ‘Her name was Linda or Lindsay. Lindsay I think. She is a nurse, she was wearing a blue uniform like the nurses here wear.’

‘How old was she?’

‘Thirty-five maybe,’ Paolo said. ‘I don’t remember very much. She had short hair, like a man. Very blonde, almost white.’

‘OK. We’ll see if we can find her.’

Adams got up and left the room, closing the door behind him.

Ferreira felt the heat from the radiator burning across her back and Paolo’s rough fingers gripping her own so tightly that the ligaments stood out in his wrist.

‘He does not believe me.’

‘He does.’

‘No. I can see. He thinks I am lying.’